Butt kickin’, for goodness!

Came across a few very enjoyable pieces of entertainment the last few days, so I thought I’d collect them all in a post and title it with a quote from a great piece of entertainment from a sadly bygone era :)

I saw YouTube clips of Penn & Teller on The Late Show with David Letterman, doing a macabre trick to promote their video cassette release in 1989 (I remember that one actually had to rewind these ‘video cassette’ things…) and a nice coins-and-goldfish trick on Halloween in 2007.

I read Lawrence Block’s When the Sacred Ginmill Closes yesterday.  I’ve come to enjoy Lawrence Block, who writes immensely readable crime stories where most of the action is in the dialogue and the choices of the protagonist.  I have books about Keller, the amoral yet conscientious hitman.  Keller is always fun – how many times do you get into the head of someone who’s killed so often that he’s come up with a foolproof way of distancing himself from his job and who’s well-adjusted enough to teach that method to his best friend after she had to kill their boss?  I have many starring Bernie Rhodenbarr, the unreformed burglar with a knack for coming across bodies during his illegal excursions and then solving them to save his hide.  The Rhodenbarr books are formulaic but rollickingly good reads – Bernie’s tempted to burgle, he tries not to but does it anyway, he finds a body in the house he burgles or a murder occurs at exactly the same time and he’s a suspect and he can’t of course use his burgling as an alibi, he solves the murder after a roundabout romp and at the classic gathering of suspects.  The Ginmill book was my first about Matthew Scudder, the ex-alcoholic whose melancholic remembrances overflow with bourbon and the fragile brotherhood of drunks.  If it’s any indication, then I’ve missed his best series… until now.  Time to catch up.

I saw this fine and funny reminder that all is well in this world, except for our expectations and impatience :)

I also saw this horrific picture (snicker snicker): the last thing Sparkly saw…

Joshua Bell, Desiderata and Detroit

Came across two beautiful pieces of writing and one intriguing blog post the last few days, and I thought I’d share them.

Joshua Bell

The intriguing blog post was from Tim’s Blog, about a stunt/experiment that violinist extraordinaire Joshua Bell took part in.  [See the Washington Post story here to get the background.  (Free registration may be required.)]  To paraphrase the Post, on this Friday morning, in the middle of the first rush hour of the day, at the arcade of a busy train station, one of the best violinists in the world played some of the most moving music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made, for 43 minutes.  Many walked past Joshua Bell without a second glance, even though he wasn’t being miserly with his talent – he played one of the most difficult pieces a violinist can play, in his energetic, all-motion style.  At the end, he earned just over 50USD, including a 20USD donation toward the end of the stunt/experiment from someone who recognised him.

This stunt/experiment asks several questions about beauty and its context, but I also like Tim’s question: “How many things are we missing?” If people can ignore Joshua Bell’s music, what else that is significant and beautiful and true might they be missing?

I think this context bit is worth thinking about a little more, too.  Say you saw this athletic floppy-haired chap with a liquid backhand playing tennis with a powerful muscular left-hander who hits his forehands with a vicious topspin, would you know who they were if you hadn’t seen them on TV before?  And would it make a difference, to whether you watch them play or not?  Should it?  That says something about the power of globalisation and media and technology.

Desiderata

I came across Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata via the Personal MBA blog and absolutely loved it.  I think you will too.

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.

As far as possible, without surrender,
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even to the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons;
they are vexatious to the spirit.

If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain or bitter,
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs,
for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals,
and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love,
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment,
it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.
You are a child of the universe
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be.
And whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life,
keep peace in your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

Detroit

(Not sure why, but I usually misspell “Detroit”.)  I really enjoyed this article about Detroit’s resilience as its famed automobile industry collapses.  The article is written by Mitch Albom – author of “Tuesdays with Morrie” – and a stirring piece, even from this far away.

Randy Pausch…

is as enthrallingly engaging in his book “The Last Lecture” as he is in the video of his last lecture.  I had the privilege of reading his book recently, and appreciated it more than I thought I would.  I had thought that the book would be a rehash of the main points of his last lecture – which I had found riveting – but instead I found that the two media complemented each other in a visceral way.  The video gave me a sense of who he was – the wisecracking smart-alecky prof, utterly unsorry for himself; the book provided a deeper portrait of his life and communicated his love and hopes for the family he was about to leave so soon.

If you enjoyed either, you might want to read/view the other.  If you haven’t done either, erm… what are you waiting for? :)

Read another Michael Chabon book

… liked another Michael Chabon book.* So what else is new? :p

*This one was called “Gentlemen of the Road” (see a review here), a rollicking buddy story set in one of those medieval, near-fantasy worlds, with the requisite multiple metaphors one would expect from Chabon and a fresh sense of adventure.  It’s a quick read, just under 200 pages, but satisfying, like a personal-size, crispy-thin pizza baked by a chef generous with high-quality ingredients.

Growing Great Employees

I think it’s because of my work.  Through sheer blind luck (shbluck, I like to call it; say it three times really fast – shbluck shbluck shbluck; there, I believe I’ve just remotely dislocated your tongue :p), I happened to get my first job promoting what are essentially good management practices.  I’m still doing it, though how much of that is by active choice and how much of that is by virtue of my absolute stuck-ness in my comfort zone is anyone’s guess.

I think it’s because of my work that I got into reading management books.  Some I read a bit and stopped, uninterested.  Some I read and liked.  The first was Jim Collins‘ Good to Great.  A couple of Marcus Buckingham’s early books come to mind.*  Ram Charan I’ve enjoyed.

I think it’s because of my work that I came across Erika Andersen’s Growing Great Employees, and, if that is so, that I really really love my work.  I couldn’t put it down: the gardening analogy; the super-useful models; the humour, self-deprecating and witty; the conversations, especially those between well-meaning manager and eager-to-learn report; the conversations, with dialogue so real and rich with good intentions that I teared at the last one, when the manager announced he was leaving the company and was going to recommend that his report take over his position.  Sure, the conversations were meant to show the reader how the models could be put into practice, but during the all-too-short learning jaunt reading the book, the conversations were what I turned the pages for.  I didn’t want the book to end because of the conversations.

Not that the book wasn’t useful, or enlightening.  In fact, I’m going to bring it to work with me tomorrow, and park it right next to my dictionary.

*I wonder what his relationship with Gallup is now.

The Time Traveler’s Wife

A colleague lent me Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife months ago, and I finally got down to reading it today.  I thought that it was overall a well-written, moving book, which uses its time-traveling twist to set up some poignant situations e.g. the time-traveler’s child travels to the past to visit her parents, from a future in which her father is dead, and is asked by her father not to let her mother know he dies.  Without the time-traveling, the story wouldn’t be as special, but the author does a great job of not making a pretzel out of the narrative, and the book is a joy to read.

I jotted down some comments about the story as I read it – call it live commentary, if you like – and I’ve reproduced my jottings below.

[Warning: Spoilers ahead.]

p8 – The author’s wasted no time setting up the rather special time-traveling situation, so there’s no need to spend time figuring it out.  Good.

p20 – A nice line, describing Henry, post coitus: “He’s sleeping with abandon, torqued into an unlikely shape as though he’s washed up on some beach…”

p40 – Things are going along happily, if a little goofily, and suddenly I recall that a reviewer had called the book “an elegy to love and loss”, and I realise that things won’t stay this happy…

p48 – I read, “Our daughter, I think sadly, would have looked like this.”, and think in my head: “See what I mean?  See what I mean?!”

p254 – I cannot stop reading.  Over the past two, three hours, I’ve been wanting a nap, but I am even now reading on.  The writing is tight, the story is interesting, and I care very much about how Henry and Clare are.

p308 (6.09pm) – Still cannot stop.  Stupid book.

p348 (6.30pm) – Now I understand why, some pages earlier, Clare was sitting on a blood-soaked bed, holding a tiny monster in her hand.

p376 (6.52pm) - So Henry dies.  Dammit.

p414 (7.20pm) - Ah so that’s why Gomez was so possessive.

p519 (8.30pm) – I finish the book.  The ending is satisfying, in a way that deepens the couple’s relationship.  I’m trying to figure the book out.  Maybe it’s about the mythology of the one true love, who would find you across space and time, the one you instinctively long for.

Another week on national service

The first week of this month saw yours truly again back on reservist training.  As with the last time, it was a productive time for reading – I finished a couple of below-par Nero Wolfe mysteries* (namely If Death Ever Slept and Death of a Dude) and Kathy Reichs’s Death Du Jour**.  (Yes yes, I know that’s a fairly morbid trio of titles.)

I wouldn’t have thought it mattered, but somehow not travelling to work made travel less of a routine, and I began to notice things, and observe, and ponder.  Like, how PSPs have joined MP3 players and multifunctional phones to make our society more crowded and un-connected.  Like, how a woman wearing black wraparound shades sat back, face-up, smiling, in one of the middle seats in a row full of sleeping, rocking zombies, letting the early morning sun play its light on her cheek and nose and cheek.  Like, how an old man, standing half a car away, peered outside with an expression of bland appreciation so intense that I looked in the direction he peered, and there were trees, grown taller and leafier since I last saw them. Like, how our friendship would have changed when my friends come back from their brave journey toward PhD-dom in Arizona and Colorado.  Like, how beneficient one must be to arrange for the wisecracking, foul-mouthed sergeant major taking care of us this reservist to have one of the friends’ name and small, wiry build.  And like, how, at the range, with ear-buds on, the air tinged with the scent of superheated oil from earlier shots, my fist intently pounding at the sandbag so as to nestle my rifle in the resulting depression and tuck it firmly against my shoulder, I begin to hear my own breath pulsing in, pulsing out, and the world begins to confine itself to that moment, and the next, and the next, until the order is given – “Watch your front!” – and the safety is clicked off, and my cheek lines itself along the gun and my eyes narrow and squint and the target appears and my finger pulls the trigger and the moment extends like silk from a spider, until the silk snaps in the wind and the target swings down, and the next appears.

*I’m a huge fan of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe series.  For a long period, I would re-read his books before sleeping – the world of 1950s New York, Wolfe’s brownstone house, his idiosyncracies and his wisecracking sidekick Archie Goodwin (who’s a protagonist in these stories in the most un-Watson way) form a restful comfort zone.  These two books were disappointing in that the murderer could have been any of the suspects in either book, and essentially both Wolfe and Archie spend most of the book not solving the murder, but the pleasure of spending time with the two characters was worth the reading time, at least.

**My colleague and I had gone to New Zealand on work with another colleague last year, and we had discovered that we shared a liking for reading during the trip.  After we returned, we exchanged books: I passed her Poppy Z Brite’s Liquor [click through to read Chapter 1, in pdf form], and she passed me the abovementioned Death Du Jour, and after nearly a year, I finally got to finishing it.  I really didn’t like it very much – I didn’t care for any of the characters – but the author’s web site is so good-naturedly friendly that I think I will give her another try.

Connecting

I think I may be over-generalising, but here are two stories that showed me how straightforward it can be to connect with the people one wants to reach.

Christopher Hitchens would make a lousy terrorist [via GOOD Magazine] – What an idea!: To convince lawmakers that waterboarding may reasonably be construed as torture find out if waterboarding may reasonably be construed as torture, recruit 50 lawyers to undergo 5 seconds of breathing through a water-soaked cloth.  Offering a physical, memorable experience: I think that’s a visceral way of connecting with people and getting them to see a point of view.  By the way, journalist and brave chap Christopher Hitchens went through it and lived to tell the tale.  But, as he writes, it is far from clear what the conclusion is: That waterboarding makes one shaky and scared and is therefore effective as an interrogation technique?  Or that waterboarding makes one shaky and scared and therefore eager to say anything?

When you least expect it [via Seth's Blog] – What an (entirely happier) idea!: When processing an order for printing T-shirts, pay attention to what is being printed; if it’s for a good cause, see if you can further that cause, thus connecting with your customer.  I think it’s fairly safe to say that this would create a “Wow!” moment.  If you’re a believer in what Jan Carlzon (formerly the President of Scandinavian Airlines) called “moments of truth”, creating as many of these as possible and then differentiating your product/service at these moments can really boost that word-of-mouth goodwill.*

*Here’s what he said in his book “Moments of Truth”, published in 1987:

Last year, each of our 10 million customers came in contact with approximately five SAS employees, and this contact lasted an average of 15 seconds each time.  Thus, SAS is “created” in the minds of our customers 50 million times a year, 15 seconds at a time.  These 50 million “moments of truth” are the moments that ultimately determine whether SAS will succeed or fail as a company.  They are the moments when we must prove to our customers that SAS is their best alternative.

Investment 101

As part of my induction about the world of investing, which is necessary since I want to make the most of my money, I’ve just finished Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor, a how-to guide that’s been so influential since its first edition was published in 1949 that he revised and put out three further editions, and a yet more recent rendition of its fourth edition was published, with comments to bring the decades-old text up to date from Jason Zweig, who is a senior writer at Money magazine.

At the risk of oversimplifying it, although a lot of the book was beyond me, I think I understood enough to take away three things:

• There is a difference between investing and speculating.  One of the differences: Investing is a long-term prospect; speculating is altogether more ad-hoc.  Another difference: Investing is based on the concept that, in the long run, the value of what you invest in will appreciate*; speculating is more about the feeling that, “Mmm… everyone seems to be buying this… I probably should too”.  Investing, realistically, is about managing risk, making as sure as you can that out of the different things you buy into, more will appreciate than not; speculating is about hoping that a bet will pay off, without hedging it.

• There is a difference between an aggressive investor and a defensive investor.  Aggressive investors actively scour the market, scan through annual reports for good investments and continually adjust their portfolios to reflect their research; defensive investors choose good investments and sit tight and let their money grow.  Graham’s warning that people just aren’t wired to be good investors – aggressive investors need to put in so much work; defensive investors need to be so disciplined – is one of the most accurate observations in the book.

• Because the market is efficient, there is very little one can do to accurately choose investments that will grow without fail over a short-term – certainly not accurately enough to toss in all one’s capital.  If you want to invest, but are too lazy to do the required work, you may want to buy into an index-linked fund with the money you can safely spare, every month.  And let it grow.  For at least 10 years.

Graham had a great device for illustrating how ridiculous it is to be swayed to and fro by the market, like many speculators are.  Two paragraphs from the book about the schizophrenic, passive-aggressive Mr Market:

Let us close this section with something in the nature of a parable.  Imagine that in some private business you own a small share that cost you $1,000.  One of your partners, named Mr Market, is very obliging indeed.  Every day he tells you what he thinks your interest is worth and furthermore offer either to buy you out or to sell you an additional interest on that basis.  Sometimes his idea of value appears plausible and justified by business developments and prospects as you know them.  Often, on the other hand, Mr Market lets his enthusiasm or his fears run away from him, and the value he proposes seems to you a little short of silly.

If you are a prudent investor or a sensible businessman, will you let Mr Market’s daily communication determine your view of the value of a $1,000 interest in the enterprise?  Only in case you agree with him, or in case you want to trade with him.  You may be happy to sell out to him when he quotes you a ridiculously high price, and equally happy to buy from him when his price is low.  But the rest of the time you will be wiser to form your own ideas of the value of your holdings, based on full reports from the company about its operations and financial position.

*The implications of this statement are wide and deep.  It means that you should probably not look at buying stocks that are already highly valued, but should first look at those that are, for some reason, undervalued.  It means you should be aware that stocks are representations of market expectations, which may be inaccurate and uninformed, and misled and overweaningly cultish at worst, and look at the annual reports of the these companies to come to a conclusion about how much they should be valued.  It means the stocks issued by well-run, responsible, winning companies may not be the stocks you should buy, unless, for some reason, the companies’ stocks are undervalued – e.g. Coca-Cola’s stock after it rolled out “New Coke”.

Clones have feelings too

A couple of weekends ago, just before I read The Theory of Clouds (see the last two entries), I read Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.

I saw a St Andrew’s Junior College student reading it today. I knew she was from SAJC because of her uniform and because the edge of the pages of the book was stamped with the words “St Andrew’s Junior College Library”. And I knew it was Never Let Me Go because I recognised part of the text on the page the student happened to be reading.

Never Let Me Go is narrated by Kathy H, and her last name is a letter because clones have only letters for last names. The narration follows her journey from Hailsham School, a sheltered place where clones are raised like normal children and urged to creative pursuits to prove they have souls by believers of clone rights, through her travails with her closest friends Ruth and Tommy, to the denouement: clones like her exist to donate, and generally, after their fourth donation, a much-respected feat, they complete.

Never Let Me Go is brilliantly conceived. If Kathy H were not a clone, this may have merely been a stylishly executed memoir of teenage angst, loss of innocence, unfulfilled love and resignation to fate. But Kathy and Ruth and Tommy are clones, meant to donate and to complete, usually in their early or middle thirties, and Ishiguro creates a mythology for them that is charged with a sense of transience and all the familiar human foibles. We can identify with Ruth’s obsession with finding her possible, the original from which she was copied, to see what she was meant to do in her life; with Kathy’s leafing page by page through a porn magazine, trying to find her own face, seeking an explanation for her sexual urges; with Tommy’s being mocked for his lack of creative talent and then, having come across an urban legend about how creative, soulful, deserving clones may get an extra three years before starting to donate, the belated and desperate flowering of his artistry.

I found the last roughly 200 words of the book heartrending, and I’ll provide a bit of background before I reproduce the book’s last two paragraphs, with those 200 words.

Tommy is the love of Kathy’s life. And Norfolk is a special place in their world. Because the maps at Hailsham School did not have details of Norfolk for some reason, the teachers made a joke out of it – “don’t get lost and end up in Norfolk” – and it came to be imagined by the students as a place where all their lost things went. After they left Hailsham, and Kathy lost a beloved cassette tape, Kathy and Tommy came to Norfolk, and spent an entire afternoon rummaging through second-hand stores, and eventually amazingly found the same cassette tape.

The only indulgent thing I did, just once, was a couple of weeks after I heard Tommy had completed, when I drove up to Norfolk, even though I had no real need to. I wasn’t after anything in particular and I didn’t go up as far as the coast. Maybe I just felt like looking at all those flat fields of nothing and the huge grey skies. At one stage I found myself on a road I’d never been on, and for about half an hour I didn’t know where I was and didn’t care. I went past field after flat, featureless field, with virtually no change except when occasionally a flock of birds, hearing my engine, flew up out of the furrows. Then at last I spotted a few trees in the distance, not far from the roadside, so I drove up to them, stopped and got out.

I found I was standing before acres of ploughed earth. There was a fence keeping me from stepping into the field, with two lines of barbed wire, and I could see how this fence and the cluster of three or four trees above me were the only things breaking the wind for miles. All along the fence, especially along the lower line of wire, all sorts of rubbish had caught and tangled. It was like the debris you get on a seashore: the wind must have carried some of it for miles and miles before finally coming up against these trees and these two lines of wire. Up in the branches of the trees, too, I could see, flapping about, torn plastic sheeting and bits of old carrier bags. That was the only time, as I stood there, looking at that strange rubbish, feeling the wind coming across those empty fields, that I started to imagine just a little fantasy thing, because this was Norfolk after all, and it was only a couple of weeks since I’d lost him. I was thinking about the rubbish, the flapping plastic in the branches, the shore-line of odd stuff caught along the fencing, and I half-closed my eyes and imagined this was the spot where everything I’d ever lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing here in front of it, and if I waited long enough, a tiny figure would appear on the horizon across the field, and gradually get larger until I’d see it was Tommy, and he’d wave, maybe even call. The fantasy never got beyond that – I didn’t let it – and though the tears rolled down my face, I wasn’t sobbing or out of control. I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be.